August 23, 2011

... It makes economic sense. The president should think big -- upward of $100 billion a year for at least two years...

Unfortunately, a major public works program doesn’t make political sense right now. Republicans have served notice that they intend to stand pat against new federal spending...

The editors recommend a deal:

Obama should temporarily suspend Davis-Bacon, then ask Congress to repeal the act and let the market decide wage rates, as it does for every other industry....

Such a deal would stretch federal money, resulting in more jobs, especially for less-skilled workers who have been out of work for more than six months. And it would finally allow Obama to have a Works Progress Administration-style program that’s been missing from his recovery plans.

I can't picture the Republicans accepting this. And does the public actually want a Works Progress Administration-style program?

166 comments:

It would certainly confirm that this is a depression. I wonder of he wants that image? What he could do is dismantle the EPA regulations since he was inaugurated but he won't. Ditto for the defacto moratorium on drilling.

Obama had a chance to do this in 2009, instead he chose the Stimulus Slush Fund option.

Historic preservationists still study New Deal projects. They left an indeliable mark on our landscape. There will be no such studies 50 years from now with regard to Stimulus projects.

Say what you want about New Deal policies, those who did WPA/CCC projects wanted to work for a living. People won't work such jobs of making big rocks into little rocks if unemployment pays better and lets you sit on the couch.

Another good jobs program I think he would probably see as worthwhile is a full invasion of Canada. Plenty of military slots to open up, lots of armaments jobs, etc, plus the benefit of moving the capital to Toronto.

As George Will pointed out on "This Week" this past Sunday, the all powerful snail darter will prevent a Hoover Dam like project. Let an environmental extremist discover that a snail darter might be harmed, and the project will end before it even begins.

Hey Americas Politico, didn't you vow to go away at some point? A person's word ought to mean something to him even if it doesn't mean anything to anyone else. That tells me a lot about you and your integrity.

Because nothing says American success like freshly painted fire hydrants.

(Meanwhile, foreign companies continue to de-list on the U.S. stock exchanges to rid themselves of the onerous regulatory and reporting burdens of the U.S. government.)

Meanwhile, foreign companies build the fire hydrants, the paint brushes, and the paint. The 8-hour job complete with three guys to do it (1 supervisor, 1 painter, and one guy to fetch donuts every 90 minutes) are 100% American.

In the 1930's the local WPA administrators could operate in a very freewheeling fashion. Get a grant, start people working, and design as they went.

This is not how it works today. It takes a year or two to get a grant approved, then go through the selection process for a design firm, then there is preliminary studies and design to get a basis for the Environmental Assessment, then public hearings, etc., revise the preliminary plans, and get environmental approval, then go to work to develop final plans and specifications and advertise for bids, accept a bid, and give Notice to Proceed.

Even if Obama gets re-elected, he will be out of office and forgotten before any actual physucal work even gets started.

Obama doesn't inspire anybody who actually does stuff. He inspires lay-abouts and stuffed shirts in ivory towers. All the inspiration in the world won't get them to do anything productive. How about this for leadership and inspiration: let's rebuild the world trade center in 12 months. I don't even care if we spend government money to do it (I can't believe I said that).

"Say what you want about New Deal policies, those who did WPA/CCC projects wanted to work for a living. People won't work such jobs of making big rocks into little rocks if unemployment pays better and lets you sit on the couch."

Which is genius, really. It works as both a response to the economy as a well as justifying continuing illegal immigration. Jobs that Americans won't do can be filled by others who do still want to work. And since all those billions of dollars have been invested we have to find people to do the work.

See http://donsingleton.blogspot.com/2011/08/new-public-works-program.html

I believe the Republicans are much more likely to support a plan that would spread already approved federal spending over more out of work people, than Obama is likely to risk offending Labor by calling for a repeal of Davis Bacon. Labor Unions do not care their people are out of work, as long as enough are employed to pay the dues that keep them employed, but repealing Davis Bacon would hurt them as much as not having dues deducted directly from the Union Members paychecks.

Our small business will have to pay something like $100,000 in federal income tax this year. If we didn't have to pay this, I could have employed another person in marketing, and used the rest for a downpayment on a machine tool that would have employed about one other person to run the jobs I'd get from the work of that person in marketing.

Instead, they'll use this $100,000 to employ maybe 0.5 people, to dig a hole so that someone else can fill it in.

1. Non-Union,2. Red State, particularly Texas,3. Profit Oriented,4. Not Green, 5. Having any adverse effect at all on the environment,5. Helping to make a rich capitalist even richer,6. Privately funded.

I expect that the jobs announcement will focus exclusively on "good" jobs.

This is what happens when you let academics run the country: They try to solve economic problems with history books. Their only point of reference is FDR, so they're recreating FDR's policies for today.

That must be why Obama's EPA is shutting down everyone's power plants. The administration can re-electrify the country! That was pretty popular.

(If I were a Jewish butcher in New York, I'd be terrified right about now. He's coming after you!)

The things Obama could do to help stimulate the economy are the very things he is not wired to consider, Basically that the best thing the federal government can do is less. Less regulation, less spending, less taxes, less speeches, less.

As a start, both energy and agriculture should be freed up to produce what they are arguably the best in the world at doing and that has an export ready market. A no brainer.

"This is what happens when you let academics run the country: They try to solve economic problems with history books. Their only point of reference is FDR, so they're recreating FDR's policies for today."

That is what Ithink whenever the talking heads suggest Obama do something Clinton did or Reagan did.

Unless they are literally shovel ready jobs, the think is another President vacation wet dream. All these construction jobs are people running machines. The construction companies will be reluctant to buy machines for two years of government contracts.

Remember the home insulation program in the "Stimulus" bill? Ballyhooed because it could be put into effect immediately and would not require an especially skilled workforce.

So, after a year - actually a little longer, I think - someone asked how come hardly any of the appropriated money had been spent, and they went to inquiring and found that no actual work had been done because the Federal Agency in charge was still working on writing the regulations under which the work would be done.

Then I guess everybody lost interest, since no more has been heard of this program. Perhaps the money has been re-allocated, or the localities just spent it on whatever, or it is still just sitting there - or all 3. I am pretty sure that even if the Agency has finished writing, reviewed, adopted, and published the regulations,the end result is not anything the people this program was intended to help would want to get trapped in.

Christopher said...Is this public works program going to be full of those shovel ready jobs we were promised?

8/23/11 11:22 AM

The only thing that Obama and the democrat-communists have shovel ready is the bullshit.

Hey if we are going to go through yet another round of Obama's infinite spending list at least make it so everyone on welfare or unemployment actually has to work on constructions jobs (preferable out in the elements) in order to collect. Do that and get rid of Davis-Bacon and force the states and local governments to get rid of their equivalents and I might even consider voting for him. You can betcha President Palin will do this and more like banning federal civil service unions.

Repeal the minimum wage *and* Davis-Bacon. Davis-Bacon would make Mickey Kaus so ecstatic that he might just have an aneurysm on the spot, and minimum wage would unleash a hell of a lot of inactive labor. We're a nation with double-digit real unemployment where the alleys and sidewalks are full of weeds and the neighborhoods full of delayed maintenance.

NPR was *pouring* scorn on this morning's deregulation flyer from the White House. They found some conservative or neolib economists to just tear into the proposal as superficial and trivial, pointing out that it's Obamacare and Dodds-Frank which is the looming regulatory threat.

Milton Friedman once visited a third world country that had embarked on an ambitious public works program. He expressed his surprise that there were few modern, mechanized, earth moving implements being used. Instead, there were hoards of people using common shovels to move the dirt. Of course, Friedman was puzzled by the enormous inefficiency, and so he asked the project manager to explain himself.

The project manager replied, "this project should not be evaluated based on its economic merits. The goal is to give people jobs. So the correct way to measure the success of the program is by how many people are employed."

To which Friedman replied without missing a beat, "then why don't you take their shovels away and give them spoons?"

If all of a sudden if to draw your unemployment check you had to show up three days a week to do some sort of manual labor to rebuild a park, pick up trash along a highway or some other job that would spiff up the public landscape, I bet there would be a whole lot less people drawing an unemployment check

Have the Fed buy mortgages directly from banks or Remics, and then the FEd can charge off the mortgages to their fair market value to allow the holders to refinance. This would allow underwater home owners to get back to par and give them the ability to refinance and sell their home without foreclosure. The fed can offset the losses on the writedowns with the interest payments they are earning from Treasuries.

The Fed can then offer mortgages to prime borrowers at very low interest rates - say 1%. However, the mortgages would only be 15 year mortgages. The Fed can fund these mortgages with the excess deposits they are currently getting from banks or by printing money. A 15 year mortgage at 1% has the same payment as a 30 year mortgage at 6%.

This program would pay down private sector debt at a much faster pace, creating a better growth environment in the future.

It's just a quick google away, GM. It was at the head of a very large number of hits. Are you suggesting, san link, that the Obama administration did not make these claims? You don't remember them saying anything about unemployment if the stimulus package didn't get passed?

We should send the unemployed back to school to become diversity trainers, EPA enforcers, snail darter counters, flash mob apologists, sufficient-minorities-in-the-photograph monitors, and earthquake-in-New-York-and-DC predictors.

We should send the unemployed back to school to become diversity trainers, EPA enforcers, snail darter counters, flash mob apologists, sufficient-minorities-in-the-photograph monitors, and earthquake-in-New-York-and-DC predictors.

'When Obama signed the stimulus, the most recent economic statistics (for January 2009) showed a national unemployment rate of 7.8 percent. Obama's economic advisers had predicted the stimulus would keep the national unemployment rate below 8 percent.'

I think the partisan hacks don't remember a lot of things Obama promised.

Obama never made that promise. It was a projection from two of his advisers:

"It should be understood that all of the estimates presented in this memo are subject to significant margins of error," the report states. "There is the more fundamental uncertainty that comes with any estimate of the effects of a program. Our estimates of economic relationships and rules of thumb are derived from historical experience and so will not apply exactly in any given episode. Furthermore, the uncertainty is surely higher than normal now because the current recession is unusual both in its fundamental causes and its severity."

There's also a footnote that goes along with the chart that states: "Forecasts of the unemployment rate without the recovery plan vary substantially. Some private forecasters anticipate unemployment rates as high as 11% in the absence of action."

Garage: "That's a conservative nightmare right there. New jobs, that is."

I cant think of anything better than new private sector jobs and nothing worse than more govt. I somehow think we got along fine with the government we had two years ago or ten. We do not need more "help."

We went from "Obama promised" to the truth: a report written by two of his advisers with heavy disclaimers. Never ceases to amaze the howlers that come from right wingers on the stimulus and the ACA. If you have to lie about it, it doesn't say much for your argument.

Lol!!!!

Laugh it up funny boy. You were wrong about the amount spent on shovel projects, wrong about the jobs, and wrong about who claimed the effects of the bill. But, that makes you perfectly suited for a right wing blog commenter. You have that going for ya!

I watched this program on the building of Hoover Dam, where a worker on the project was interviewed. He was asked about the claim that X number of workers were buried in it (i.e. they didn't retrieve their bodies). His response was, "That's ridiculous. We fished eveybody out. They would have ruined the concrete!"

"... Laugh it up funny boy. You were wrong about the amount spent on shovel projects, wrong about the jobs, and wrong about who claimed the effects of the bill. But, that makes you perfectly suited for a right wing blog commenter..."

You're right garage, Obama pushed a spending bill based upon advice from his top economic advisors that was supposed to stimulate the economy and create jobs, it did neither and I'm the one who is wrong.

And ill stand by that too. I'm not going to absolve him from what his advisors told him if he then turns around and acts on that advice.

There was once a Democratic president who said the buck stops with him but you seem content with one who finds it easier to blame someone, anyone other than himself whose self proclaimed policies have screwed things up worse than before.

If it is funded through the accumulation of debt, as were the past programs, then unless we realize real economic growth to replace the virtual economy they are manufacturing, this latest effort will further contribute to the crises.

Unfortunately, there is no indication that the economy will grow by over 10% annually (and more will be necessary if they sustain their current rate of spending). There is also no indication that they are willing to curtail illegal immigration, which serves to displace American men, women, and children; especially those who possess similarly limited knowledge and skill, including teenagers and young adults.

Given the racist origins of Davis-Bacon would it stand up to constitutional scrutiny?

David Bernstein thinks so:http://www.cato.org/pubs/briefs/bp-017.html"No legal challenge to Davis-Bacon itself has ever been brought. Yet under current Supreme Court precedent, and a fair reading of the Constitution, the law is clearly unconstitutional as having both discriminatory intent and lingering discriminatory effects. As the Supreme Court noted in 1985 in an analogous situation involving a facially neutral but discriminatory provision of the Alabama Constitution, "without deciding whether [the provision] could be enacted today without any impermissible motivation, we simply observe that its original enactment was motivated by a desire to discriminate against blacks on account of race and the section continues to have that effect. As such, it violates equal protection [and is therefore unconstitutionall]."[68]"co

I'd much rather have people working on a WPA-type program, even if administered by the government, than sitting on the porch drinking beer or traveling to Las Vegas and Hawaii on the public dime.

God knows we have enough schools and bridges that need repainting, trails fixed, streets swept. Those are shovel, broom and paintbrush-ready jobs. You don't need an environmental impact report and two years of planning to do any of that.

Of course it would never happen. The unions won't let you sweep the streets unless you get union wages and full retirement at 55.

I love the liberal nostalgia for FDR and the massive government he created, until the War finally rescued him from the absence of evidence that anything was actually being accomplished.

I specially love Rachael Madow's advocacy for a new Hoover Dam-like project to put people to work and make America great again. What she and other Depression era romanticizers fail to note is that the number of governmental regulations today is larger by a factor of 20 than the relatively simple rules of the '30's.

Every day, five days a week, the Federal Register is published. Each issue averaging 1/2 to 1 inch thick, all chock-a-block with new and proposed regulations. Each one a hurdle that must be surmounted in order to accomplish anything is America. Each and every one, no doubt, established for our own good by those who know better.

If anything so grand as a dam, on any river in America were proposed today, there is no way a single shovelful of earth will be turned for 8-10 years. No one but a handful of planers, environmental scientists and lawyers will be employed, all of them already working. The unemployed will continue to fester until the next election passes judgement on the misguided nature of this course of action.

Name one fucking year that the fed gov didn't spend an enormous amount of money on the roads. I've driven between here and there in the summertime since 1964 and the present, and there have always been road projects going on.

You're right not to waste the effort. Jackass mahal linked to a politifact article and has parroted what it says in this thread - gragie want a cracker?

The article makes the claims attributed to IHS, Moody's and CBO that garage cut and pasted . There are no links to the IHS, Moddy, or CBO numbers in the article, just the claim.

A quick search of the IHS site reveals that they were and are any BUT of the opinion that the stimulus is creating jobs. In actual fact, they believe the stimulus has done the opposite. Try this link for what IHS actually thinks of the stimulus:

That's one example. and Just on the IHS site. I won't bother chasing down the garage/politifact claims about Moody's or the CBO. It will be more of the same.

I find it sadly amusing that the lightweight smarties on the left - like garage - will swallow any portion of bullshit they are served as long as they can use it in some half-assed attempt to discredit people able to independently think. I find it vastly amusing that these asshats are so smugly convinced that they have it right.

'Check the right side of the page at the link, shit for brains. There are 22 links, even a dim bulb such as yourself should be able to find them.'

Caught you, asshat. Read them yourself you stupid parrot. Because, shit for brains, unlike yourself, I DID work through the links - CBO, Moody's, IHS relating to your cut and paste claims. And...they do NOT support the politifact analysis. The claims in the politifact article are unsupported.

Why? Each and every one of them, mostly from 2009 (as the IHS link I gave purposely was) is based on the assumption that the economy and the housing market will improve in 2010 and 2011. A person capable of independent though immediately sees that, understands the implications, and discards the claims as unsupported.

Why? Think of it, if that is possible for you, the numbers are projected using the premise that the economy and the housing market will improve in 2010 and 2011.

I made sure that the article I linked was even more unambiguous when saying that than the ones politifact linked.

You realize that any jackass still using 2 year old projections based on events assumed to occur in the following 12 - 18 months and that did not occur is either a moron or a liar?

My mistake, and I make them now and again, was in saying 'There are no links to the IHS, Moddy, or CBO numbers in the article, just the claim' when I should have said 'There are no links to the IHS, Moddy, or CBO that support the numbers in the article, just the claims'.

You are too easy, parrot. I reiterate - you will eat any portion of steaming bullshit served you by those who do your thinking and pass it on as established fact. All you did was google the Obama 8% claim and regurgitate the first thing google - google for christ's sake - put in front of you.

Unlike you, I looked to see if politifact's claims were supported. You made no attempt to verify or understand.

Every person on this site capable of independent thought mocks you. This is a good example of why.

Garage's position is the stimulus projections coming from his administration isn't the same as him saying it himself.

The projections had heavy disclaimers so its our fault for putting any reliance on what his handpicked top economic advisors said would occur after spending nearky a trillion dollars of borrowed money from China.

We only spent 200 of the 800 billion stimulus on actual shovel ready jobs.

So I stand corrected and was totally unreasonable in holding Obama personally accountable for his promises, claims etc.

It's Bush's fault, the tsunami, bad luck and ill even accept some personal responsibility for the economic crisis.